She is with fellow Palmer United Party MLAs Anderson and Kurrupuwu at Darwin Airport, where they wait to board a flight to Brisbane to meet Palmer United Party leader Clive Palmer.

They formed the “rogue trio” who dramatically walked from the Country Liberals in late March over allegations of racism and broken promises to the bush.

This weekend they will lobby Palmer for resources beyond the Great Wall 4WD they have already been gifted. A chief of staff would be nice, they say.

But the centrepiece of their discussions is the request for Palmer to use his balance of power in the senate to quarantine an annual $2.5 billion of the Northern Territory’s Federal money for Aboriginal Affairs.

It is an ask, but nothing once it reaches Palmer’s world can be dismissed.

Anderson, as PUP leader in the Northern Territory, will lead the discussions. She was the one who picked up the phone to Palmer “weeks” after the CLP defection to broker a deal. Lee stood beside ring leader Anderson during those tumultuous weeks, interjecting with critiques searing enough to make white Australia squirm.

But this week she has, and not for the first time, been thrust alone into the spotlight of Territory politics after pleading guilty in Katherine Magistrates Court to assaulting her niece Sherese Dooley outside the town’s Centrelink office.

She had discovered illicit photos of Dooley and Lee’s long-term partner Ben Ulamari on his secret phone, sending her into a rage that nearly toppled her political ambitions.

Clearly disappointed it didn’t, Chief Minister Adam Giles described the incident as an embarrassment to the Northern Territory.

Indeed, the assault has embarrassed her personally and she has apologised.

She also pointed to the remarks of Matt Conlan, Giles’ Tourism Minister, who in February called Anderson a c*** during a parliamentary wing meeting.

“That’s not embarrassing?” she asks.

Alison Anderson comforting fellow NT Palmer United Party MLA Larisa Lee as she speaks out about her family experiences in recent light of her husband cheating on her.Source: News Corp Australia

In interviews she is still flanked by Anderson, her political mentor of more than 20 years and the niece of Lee’s father’s first wife, but she is becoming more comfortable answering and taking responsibility for herself.

“Aboriginal people are in safe hands,” Anderson says of her protege. Across the table, Kurrupuwu nods when Lee is asked about a future prime ministership.

Lee, though, bursts out laughing.

“That’s a pretty big one,” she says.

“It would be nice. The first Barack Obama of Australia.”

***

IT has been more than two years since Lee said goodbye to her four children for a near six-month campaign through Arnhem Land, her traditional homeland, to ultimately win the seat of Arnhem for the CLP.

She has never been far from controversy since.

In 2013 she faced allegations of covering up fraud for her brother Preston, then chief executive of Jawoyn Association Aboriginal Corporation. The claims were later dropped by the ORIC.

She was also accused of misappropriating money from Jawoyn for her election campaign. Despite protest she had done nothing wrong, and that Jawoyn had sanctioned her sponsorship, she agreed to pay back close to $8000.

That year she was also accused of misusing her government fuel card.

There were times as a young alcoholic tormented by family problems she considered suicide, and she reveals to the NT News her mental health issues persisted in those troubled days.

“Lots of times,” she says. “Even in politics, I just thought ‘What’s the point of going through this’.

“People can be cruel. Even when people don’t know you, they judge you. I’m the type of person, I care what people think. I care what people say and think about me.

“I don’t want people to be negative towards me and I don’t want to be negative, but I guess in the job, you’ve just got to be tough, you know.”

She was born into one of Katherine’s most powerful Aboriginal families, the last of 12 from the marriage of her mother and father, a respected Jawoyn leader who Lee has requested the NT News not name.

The family was Aboriginal royalty in those parts, but her upbringing was anything but glamorous. Her father was a heavy drinker, strict disciplinarian and he regularly bashed her mother. Police would come but charges were never laid.

She recalls one incident at just four or five years old when her father, wasted as usual, chased her mother across the softball field with a shotgun.

At about the same age she accompanied her father to his girlfriend’s house, where she was left in the car all night while the pair lay on the trampoline.

She won’t discuss what she saw, but Lee never mentioned it to him, nor did she ever forgive him.

“I saw that and I went home and told mum and I think she said ‘That was it’ … that’s when our family starting breaking apart,” she says.

Brothers and sisters began moving away, sometimes for cultural reasons as they married, sometimes not.

Larisa Lee arrives at Katherine Court.Source: News Corp Australia

One night, the toll became too much for her mother.

“This is the part I don’t really like talking about because my mum, through it all, was a good person, but I think this time she just lost it,” Lee says.

“All I remember was she grabbed my hair and I had a blackout … She took it out on me. They were having an argument and I was screaming and all I remember was she grabbed me by the hair.”

A brother later told her that her mum had swung her round by her head. Soon after, Lee moved with her mother and remaining siblings to a “tin shed” at Eva Valley connected to the grid by an extension cord running across the road.

It was there her mother, too, turned to the drink, vanishing for days at a time and leaving the family without food or money.

“It was just terrible when you think about it now,” she says. “I could never do that my kids. I had to shut it off.”

Lee found distractions in sport and school, which continued when, at 14, after about four years living with her grandmother, she shipped off for Kormilda College and found relief from community life.

She began to drink and smoke socially and fell pregnant with her first child, Djuan, at 17.

She hid the pregnancy from her father until about five months through, when she could suck in her stomach no longer.

“He was so mad; it took until Djuan was born for him to forgive me,” she says. Still, she says, he was the first person at hospital.

The relationship with her partner deteriorated and at 19, and not for the last time, she began to drink heavily.

She tried her hand at bartending, as a ticketing officer and receptionist but felt uninspired until she began as a trainee health worker in Barunga, caring for the vulnerable in her community.

Before entering politics she had risen through the ranks to become a senior Aboriginal health practitioner

Lee’s life was on the rise until 2004, the year her father died from cancer and her best friend Jodie, “the sort of friend you expected to grow old with”, was hit and killed by a car in Katherine.

Her father had been trying to mend their fractious relationship and died only about an hour after insisting his daughter “go out and have some drinks with your friends … be happy”. She returned and laid beside him until his body was taken away. He was in the same position she had left him.

“By then I had hit rock bottom,” she says.

“There wasn’t a night I didn’t fall asleep pissed out my brain. I had to have alcohol in my system every day otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sleep or cope with the pain I was going through.

“That part of my life made me, I think. It woke me up.”

She met Ben in this period and the pair had three daughters, fulfilling her father’s wish that she give him at least one granddaughter.

Nine years later, that relationship would end with the discovery of the phone and the pictures.

As a younger woman, she would have found solace in alcohol and drugs. Now, she has four children to look after — and her ambitions now burn stronger than the need for a fix.

“I’ve been through that experience, I’ve learned from my mistakes,” she says.

“I’ve experienced life. What type of person you are comes into the fold. I’m not the kind of person I was back then, that’s for sure.”

***

POLITICS had always been part of the Lee household and a parliamentary career for the youngest “had always been on the dinner plate”.

Her father was a swing voter and kept his public business to himself for the most part, but the children grew up reading newspapers and learning the issues behind Aboriginal disadvantage. Lee says she is a conservative thinker and thought the CLP a good fit, particularly when Anderson dumped Labor for her hitherto political rivals.

“I didn’t know the core business until I joined up and I thought ‘well, what are we really fighting for?’,” she says.

“You’re not in there to get elected and tell the people how it is. You’re there to represent the people, that’s why you got voted in the first place.

“You don’t represent the values of the party or the take the party lines, you’ve got to represent the values of yourself at the end of the day, and the values of your people.”

Lee says when she first joined the CLP the party proffered grand visions of inclusiveness and equality. But the relationship between the three bush MPs and senior colleagues was eventually beyond repair.

Despite 11th hour negotiations and a list of demands to the Chief Minister published in the NT News — most of which the trio deny — they walked, helped by Anderson’s suspension from the parliamentary wing.

“I thought the CLP was genuine when they said they were going to give hope back to the people. That’s what the people needed,” Lee says.

“But when we got there, sat down and listened to all the things they were putting on the table, it threw me backwards.

“I thought ‘This is not real, this is not fruitful’.”

At the heart were issues of resources and jobs for the bush, local government reforms, mandatory rehabilitation, and the policy of police in Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs stationed outside bottle shops checking IDs, which, intended or not, has inherently evolved along racial lines.

Giles rejected claims of broken bush promises and accused Anderson of wasting opportunities to build her electorate of Namatjira in Central Australia.

It was during this period Lee smoked out a Darwin hotel in an attempt to heat a loaf of garlic bread. She laughs about it now, but at the time it was another blow to a faltering public image.

“It wasn’t in Alfoil wrap or anything, I took it out of the wrap and put it on the plate. Two minutes,” she says.

“I just needed it warm enough to break it up a bit. I just walked to the bathroom and washed my face. I came back and I could smell the smoke, you know. I thought, ‘oh my goodness what’s going on’.”

This month, the trio sacked staffer Norman Fry, the former Northern Land Council chief, who joined them after getting dumped from the CLP for his part in their initial defection.

Lee accuses him and PUP defector Braedon Earley of trying to lead a mini coup against Anderson and persuade her and Kurrupuwu back to the CLP fold.

Lee wants to put the drama behind her and make a positive difference for Aboriginal people.

Giles says the billionaire Palmer is a fool for getting into political bed with the trio.

“We’ve got a good dialogue,” Lee says of Palmer.

“Is he for real or is he not? We haven’t really locked it down with him. We’ve told him if he tries to play games or anything we’ll look for a dialogue somewhere else.

Comments on this story

Johnny Degaf of Darwin Posted at 12:29 PM July 01, 2014

She is not fit to be a politician and an embarrassment to her people.

Megan of Jingili Posted at 9:08 PM June 30, 2014

Sad...not a role model on how to handle a marriage issue, not a role model on how to be a representative for ALL the people in your Electorate. Don't fall any futher for Clive...he is only using you andhd the other two for his own aims.

MacDawg of Palmerston Posted at 6:27 PM June 30, 2014

Well said Lucky - Pen. I have served for this country and am now a manager for an International Logistics Company. I work my bum off, pay my own bills, pay taxes and ive never had a handout. So Kassim, you say us Indigenous folk only get handouts? I've seen alot of white folk get generous handouts courtesy of MY tax paying dollars. Open your eyes mate!

CLP cabinet minister John Elferink charged taxpayers more than $45,000 for a ‘study trip’ to the United States over the Christmas holidays, including visits to Cape Canaveral Space Base and Universal Studios.